The ability for users to place a wide variety of orders quickly and accurately is vital to the success of an electronic medical records system designed for the acute care setting. If placing electronic orders is too time consuming or involves too much repetitious entry of order parameters, the electronic health care system loses usability and accuracy, which can lower the efficiency of a healthcare enterprise and even compromise the quality of patient care.
Physicians, nurses, clerks, and ancillary staff working in acute care settings must often place a large number of complex orders at once. The care of each patient is likely to require many orders of a number of different types, including medications, blood tests, and nurse interventions. In addition, acute care workflows lead many clinicians to enter orders for multiple patients at the same time after conducting patient rounds, which further increases the need for efficient order entry.
Orders in an acute care setting frequently require the specification of complex order parameters, such as frequency, interval, count, dose, and route, that are a challenge to communicate effectively in any ordering system, even a traditional paper ordering system. A nurse intervention order may tell the nurse to check a patient's vital signs every hour for 24 hours, then to take vitals four times per day for the next two days. Or it may ask that blood levels be tested every two hours until normal levels are reached and then every four hours up to a count of eight times. Electronic ordering systems for both ambulatory and acute care settings have usually relied on the selection of an order from a database, followed by text entry of order parameters on a number of windows for each order before it is filed. In the acute care setting, such entry methods are likely to inhibit regular use of the ordering system or even any use at all, because staff find it too cumbersome to enter order parameters by hand on more than one window for every order.
While these order parameters may be very complex, the likely parameter values for a given order generally belong to a predictable set. In few cases does care require the entry of an order “from scratch” with parameters that cannot be anticipated. A physician is likely to place many orders for patient vitals with similar frequencies at similar intervals. Therefore, text entry of electronic orders not only creates a repetitious workflow that needlessly adds time to the task of order entry, but it fails to take advantage of the ease with which many parameters can be selected from a set of pre-defined common values for the order. In addition, text entry of order parameters increases the likelihood of written error or miscommunication of what are in fact routinely selected values.